Fertility expert is so dedicated to providing children that he rarely sees his
own, writes Max Pemberton

Before I even meet Mohammed Taranissi, I've decided I won't like him. He is the controversial fertility expert who, it was recently reported, earned £25 million in a single year. He has been the subject of a criminal investigation and disciplinary hearings by the General Medical Council. He has been the focus of a Panorama documentary, has repeatedly argued with the Human Fertilisation and Embryo Authority (HFEA) and his private clinics have been raided by the police. As the benign and affable Lord Winston once put it, Dr Taranissi "makes you weep for the medical profession".

And then I meet him. Our meeting takes place in a cavernous consulting room at his clinic, a short walk from Harley Street in central London. Wearing surgical scrubs, Dr Taranissi is almost lost behind piles of paperwork. His office shows little evidence of his extraordinary financial success – the walls are covered not with expensive art, but with hundreds of framed photographs of babies and their beaming parents. Indeed, for every naysayer who accuses Dr Taranissi of making a fortune by playing God, there are many thousands of grateful couples who say he has given them a family.

While some of his techniques – such as using unproven treatments not widely prescribed in other clinics – have been criticised, his results speak for themselves. His assisted pregnancy success rate for women under 35 is twice the national average. For women over 40, they are a third better than his nearest competitor. He is open about the secret to his success: there's no magic pill, just intense, daily testing of women to maximise the chance of conception and his unwavering dedication to giving them a baby.

So is his much-cited mercenary streak evident at all? I had assumed that Dr Taranissi had made so much money because he charged a premium for his services. But, to my great surprise, his clinic is one of the cheapest in London. Women pay £150 for a consultation and about £2,500 for any subsequent course of IVF. He certainly seems uninterested in the financial side of things. Until a few years ago, all his money was sitting in a current account. It took a new bank manager to sit him down and discuss his finances: "I wasn't really focused on it at all. I know it sounds crazy, but it's true."

Dr Taranissi doesn't mix with colleagues, nor does he attend medical conferences. A Muslim born into a wealthy Egyptian family, he doesn't drink. He doesn't have a car, never has a holiday and lives in a flat near his clinic with his wife and five children. He starts work at 6.30am and is usually still at work at 9pm, seven days a week.

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One of his sons is a keen singer, but Dr Taranissi has never heard him sing. He has admitted not even knowing the name of the school his youngest child attends. It's extraordinary that this man who has given happiness to so many families, it seems, sees so little of his own. So what of his raison d'être: his work? We discuss last month's announcement by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics that "three-parent babies" – whereby faulty genes from the mother are swapped for healthy ones from a donor – should be allowed in certain cases to prevent genetic conditions. Is Dr Taranissi in favour of this? "In principle, it's something that is good," he replies.

"The technology is not perfected yet but if it could be done, it would mean that certain babies were not born with genetic diseases and surely this is a good thing." Is it right that doctors can play around with genetic material? "Anything that can prevent illness or disease must be worth pursuing. That is the purpose of medicine, to help and cure. Without that, what are any of us doing?"

Does he deliberately court attention, I ask? "I don't intentionally try to cause controversy. We do things for a reason: we try and make sure it will help people, and most of the time we've been shown to be right. Looking back, I'm very happy that quite a few things that are now commonplace started in my clinic."

Nevertheless, his career has been dogged by trouble since he set up his private clinic more than 15 years ago. In 2007 the HFEA joined forces with the BBC and arranged a police raid on his premises, which was filmed for Panorama, after some patients claimed they were mistreated. After a costly legal battle Dr Taranissi won his case, which cost the BBC well over £1 million. His disciplinary hearing before the GMC was abandoned owing to lack of evidence, and nine cases referred to the police for criminal investigation were also dropped.

The problem, as Taranissi sees it, is that the HFEA, which is made up of mainly lay people, doesn't understand the technology being discussed and so reacts in an excessively cautious manner.

He cites a practice nicknamed "saviour siblings", when an embryo is selected to be an exact tissue match for an existing sibling with a life-threatening condition. "It was presented in the media at the time [as] a spare-part baby. But really all that you're going to do is create an embryonic egg that is an exact tissue match. [It] will give a new life to a very sick child. I haven't met anybody who's objected to that once they understand."

How does he reconcile his religion with his work? He nods gently as he ponders the question. "What you're trying to do is mimic what normally happens in the body. So if you're adding eggs and sperm, you create an embryo that is genetically coming from the couple and you put it in the uterus. That's no different from what these people could've done on their own if they didn't have whatever problem they have."

But what about the excess embryos that are created by the IVF process and destroyed? Surely this is incompatible with his beliefs? "It's the couple's decision. I don't make this decision, so I shouldn't be blamed for that."

I'm unconvinced: aren't his detractors justified in accusing him of playing God? "This really, really upsets me because I don't even want to be seen like that. All we do is help nature achieve what it's meant to achieve. We don't play God. I don't think we can. I don't think anybody can." Despite the flaws in his argument, I find myself rather liking Dr Taranissi. He is utterly committed to his patients.

So what are his plans for the future? He suddenly becomes rather coy. "I don't want this [interview] to appear like an advert for me," he says. Eventually I prise out of him that he is setting up a charitable foundation to help infertile people and plans to open satellite clinics around the country. He reveals that he is also working on new techniques to make IVF treatment more accessible and less demanding.

"There's something that we're working on at the moment that, if it happens, will revolutionise the way IVF is done everywhere, will make it much, much more simple and that's what I would like to be able to do if I can." So he wants to leave a legacy? "That's what I would like to do. It would be a good thing to leave behind when you're gone."